Humanitarian Intervention

Thomas G. Weiss

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509507351
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pace e sviluppo globale

A singular development in the post-Cold War era is the use of military force to protect human beings. From Rwanda to Kosovo, Sierra Leone to East Timor, and Libya to Côte dIvoire, soldiers have rescued civilians in some of the world's most notorious war zones. But what about Syria? Why have we observed the Syrian slaughter and done nothing? Is humanitarian intervention in crisis? Is the so-called responsibility to protect dead or alive?

In this fully revised and expanded third edition of his highly accessible and popular text, Thomas Weiss explores these compelling questions. Drawing on a wide range of case studies and providing a persuasive overview of the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in the modern world, he examines its political, ethical, legal, strategic, economic, and operational dimensions to highlight key debates and controversies. Neither celebratory nor complacent, his analysis is an engaging exploration of the current quandaries and future challenges for robust international humanitarian action in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER ONE
Conceptual Building Blocks

This chapter outlines the main concepts that reappear subsequently. It begins with humanitarian intervention itself, including the crucial distinction between coercion for human protection purposes and classic UN peacekeeping. A discussion follows of the principles underpinning the international system – state sovereignty along with nonintervention, that is, a “hands-off” approach concerning matters that supposedly are in the domestic jurisdiction of states. These principles, however, confront a fundamental tension in the UN Charter and elsewhere: namely, the widespread call to respect fundamental human rights. The final section discusses change and continuity in the international system, focusing on the issues of self-determination, borders, and state capacity.

Humanitarian intervention: a contested concept

Military interventions beginning in the 1990s – against the wishes of a government, or without meaningful consent, and with humanitarian justifications – are the focus of this book. Cases where these criteria are met amount to “humanitarian intervention,” which in Adam Roberts’s succinct definition is “coercive action by one or more states involving the use of armed force in another state without the consent of its authorities, and with the purpose of preventing widespread suffering or death among the inhabitants.”¹

Some commentators argue that the definition of intervention should cover the deployment of both “solicited” and “unsolicited” military force. The emphasis here is on the unsolicited variety. The absence of consent is clearest when there is explicit opposition from a recognized government (in Iraq, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Libya). Because “the existence of de facto control is generally the most important criterion in dealing with a regime as representing the state,”² consent was controversial and of little practical meaning in other cases (Liberia, Haiti, and Sierra Leone) and irrelevant in one case (Somalia). In East Timor, consent was ambiguous – it emanated from an illegal occupying power (Indonesia) after significant international pressure that verged on coercion.

The second criterion is the prominence of a genuine humanitarian justification for action by intervening states. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty set the bar very high – the threat or actual occurrence of large-scale loss of life (especially genocide) and massive forced migration. The commission did not, for example, include the overthrow of a democratically elected government or an environmental disaster, or even widespread abuses of human rights – unless one of the results was large-scale loss of life. The intergovernmental resolution by the UN General Assembly at the September 2005 World Summit was more specific still: “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

The motives behind a government’s decision to commit military muscle to help war victims vary. They may be ethical – because it is the right thing to do to halt a humanitarian catastrophe – or legal – because states are parties to the Genocide Convention, for example. They may also involve legitimate calculations of national interests – either because acting can mitigate the direct and negative impact of a particular humanitarian disaster on national security or on the economy, or because doing so builds international society and norms. Motives may also be disingenuous – self- interested pursuit of gain disguised as “humanitarian.”

Purists would hope that only the ethical or legal would be in play for humanitarian intervention, and many would also judge as legitimate decisions involving a calculation to strengthen international society. Others would readily admit that self-interested motives can be an important element in a decision, as is what often is closely correlated, namely political will and available military capacity. Almost no one would try to justify as “humanitarian” a so-called humanitarian intervention that really reflected ugly strategic or economic interests – which should be viewed as hijacking humanitarian intervention.

Motives behind humanitarian interventions are almost invariably mixed. Looking for parsimony in motives does not really advance the discussion. If significant national interests disqualified potential humanitarian intervention, there would rarely be sufficient motivation to get involved in the first place or to stay the course – the feeble international military involvement in Darfur since 2003 and the US withdrawal from Somalia after losing 18 Rangers in October 1993 are apt illustrations. Indeed, whether one is a proponent of the “Realist” (capital “R”) perspective in international relations theory or merely a realist, one of the keys to decision-making about humanitarian intervention involves persuading states that it is in their interests to act and see actions through despite hardships or unexpected danger. As with decisions from time immemorial about just wars, those about humanitarian intervention involve thorny subjective judgments.³

While the ethical humanitarian rationale need not be exclusive or even foremost, it should be explicit and prominent. This rationale must be one of the conspicuous hooks on which humanitarian intervention hangs. In some cases, mainly nonhumanitarian justifications have predominated and prevailed – for instance, the regional security concerns of Nigeria in Liberia or of the United States about the nature of the regime in Haiti. However, responding to the needs of populations at risk remained not only in evidence but was also specifically cited as a visible component of the domestic and international sales pitch for coming to the rescue.

The evolution of peace operations

Humanitarian intervention, and other types of military enforcement action, are distinct from traditional peacekeeping, which the United Nations pioneered.⁴ Traditional peacekeeping operations since Dag Hammarskjöld and Lester Pearson’s time have been called “Chapter VI-and-a-half” for its metaphorical location between UN Charter Articles VI and VII. The mathematics can be misleading, especially when applied to what a quarter-century ago I first called “military humanitarianism.”⁵ “Chapter VI.25” would be a more accurate label for UN operations because even the most vigorous reflect consent and should be rounded down to “the pacific settlement of disputes.” Meanwhile, halting mass atrocities by invoking the responsibility to protect requires overriding the expressed wishes of political authorities and should be at least “Chapter VI.9” and rounded up to Chapter VII coercion.

Public and media perceptions are misleading if blue-helmet UN peace operations are equated with humanitarian interventions. There have been UN operations that were both, the most infamous being Somalia. The Security Council authorized the first Chapter VII operation under UN command-and-control with a resolution that mentioned “humanitarian” 18 times. When the second UN Operation in Somalia turned into humanitarian enforcement, crucial distinctions evaporated for the US-led coalition. The unceremonious display of dead US Rangers in the streets of Mogadishu resulted in the “Somalia syndrome,” which made problematic future commitments of troops with humanitarian justifications if more than zero casualties were in the offing.⁶

It is difficult to recall the unrealistic expectations surrounding the so-called UN Renaissance at the Cold War’s end after the reversal of Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. The UN-authorized and US-led Operation Desert Storm in January 1991 was followed closely by the first use of what ICISS would later label “military force for human protection purposes.”⁷ In April, Operation Provide Comfort’s no-fly zone successfully protected Kurds who had fled their homes. Enforcement in Iraq followed a series of more complex yet successful traditional peacekeeping operations in the late 1980s, dubbed “second generation” – in Cambodia, Angola, Namibia, Iran-Iraq, and Central America. For a brief moment, there was seemingly nothing that the UN could not do.

Euphoria was evident in January 1992 when the Security Council requested newly elected UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali to draft a forward-looking overview. Six months later, An Agenda for Peace⁸ conveyed an over-the-top enthusiasm for all manner of UN operations – peacekeeping, peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peace enforcement – which was short-lived after the fiasco in Somalia and troubles in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The quick success in northern Iraq spawned deployments with minimal military muscle. For example, humanitarian “safe areas” had insufficient firepower and boots-on-the-ground and were the least safe places in the Balkans. July 2015 marked the twentieth anniversary, for instance, of the massacre of some 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, one of those areas that was observed by the UN’s Dutch battalion.

Eventually, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombed Serbian positions in Bosnia-Herzegovina with UN authorization, and the Dayton Accords in November 1995 halted the humanitarian and political disaster. The previous year set the record for hapless humanitarian nonintervention in Rwanda’s genocide. Despite heroic acts, including by UN force commander General Roméo Dallaire, the inadequate 2,500-member U...